Online speech under assault around the globe

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, December 11, 2011

Photo: AP

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Indian protestors hold placards and flowers outside the residence of India's telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal as they protest against the government plans to screen websites for derogatory content in New Delhi, India, Wednesday, Dec. 7, 2011. Sibal said Tuesday that Internet giants such as Facebook and Google have ignored his demands to screen derogatory material from their sites, so the government would have to act on its own. (AP Photo) less

Indian protestors hold placards and flowers outside the residence of India's telecommunications minister Kapil Sibal as they protest against the government plans to screen websites for derogatory content in New ... more

Photo: AP

Online speech under assault around the globe

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Worldwide leaders gathered in The Hague, Netherlands, last week to discuss government responsibilities to protect online freedom, at a point when the principle is under attack around the globe.

The decentralized architecture of the Internet created an unprecedented global platform for free expression, as exemplified by the role social networking played as an organizing force of the Arab Spring. But fearful and easily offended governments around the world are cracking down on those freedoms in ways large and small.

Earlier this month, it was revealed that the otherwise thriving democracy and emerging tech powerhouse of India is pushing online giants like Facebook and Google to prevent offensive user-generated content from appearing online.

"If somebody is not willing to cooperate on incendiary material like this, it is the duty of government to think of steps that we need to take," Sibal said, raising the specter of employing technical or legal means to protect the nation's apparently delicate sensibilities.

To their credit, the businesses have refused to cooperate. Google said it will remove material that is illegal or breaks its terms of service. But none of these companies wants to get into the messy business of determining and filtering merely controversial content - especially pre-emptively and manually, as India seems to be demanding.

"We believe that access to information is the foundation of a free society," Google said.

In a similar case, the Wall Street Journal reported last week that Russia's Federal Security Service has asked the nation's largest social-networking website to block the activities of groups protesting the recent parliamentary elections.

Russia also recently sentenced anticorruption blogger Alexei Navalny to 15 days in jail for participating in protests over the outcome of those elections.

Unfortunately, he's far from the only online journalist sitting in jail. The Committee to Protect Journalists announced that the number of imprisoned journalists stood at 179 worldwide as of Dec. 1, the highest level since the mid-1990s. Nearly half of those writers, editors and photojournalists work primarily online.

Jail as a tactic

"What we see with bloggers is a deliberate attempt to silence them by throwing them in jail," said Danny O'Brien, Internet advocacy coordinator for CPJ. "They don't have any support, so it's an effective approach."

(Full disclosure: I recently donated a nominal amount of money to CPJ.)

Chiranuch Premchaiporn, the editor of a popular Thailand news site, is awaiting trial on charges of allegedly violating the nation's lese majeste laws, offending the dignity of the revered monarch. The thing is, she didn't even write the words in question - commenters on the site did.

But under Thailand's Computer Crime Act, news sites, blogs or social networks are responsible for the actions of their users. Premchaiporn's trial is expected to begin in February. She could face decades in jail.

Then, of course, there are nations occasionally knocking down Internet access almost entirely, like Egypt, or systemically filtering and monitoring its use, such as China, Syria and Bahrain. Reports in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and elsewhere have laid out how those nations employed technology from companies like Nokia Siemens, Cisco and Blue Coat in those efforts.

Not content with those points of control alone, however, Russia, China, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan last month introduced a U.N. draft resolution that would grant nations greater authority over the workings of the Internet within their boundaries. That would undermine the de facto oversight of the United States, which correctly opposes the measure.

Fortunately, there were some positive developments in recent days, too. On Thursday, Rep. Chris Smith, R-N.J., introduced legislation that would ban the export of censorship or surveillance technology to repressive regimes.

At the end of the two-day Freedom Online conference, co-sponsored by the Dutch government and Google, the United States and 13 other nations pledged to work toward preventing "the misappropriation of technologies for repressive ends, inappropriate requests for personal data for political purposes, and illegitimate blocking of content," the Associated Press reported.

In addition, the European Union and other governments pledged money and training to help bloggers conceal their identity and continue to disseminate information even when governments attempt to block the Internet.

During her speech at the conference, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton criticized companies that provide censorship technology to oppressive regimes and insisted nations have far more to gain than lose by allowing unfettered online access.

"An open Internet will lead to stronger, more prosperous countries," she said. "We will preserve the Internet as open and secure for all."

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